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Stovers,<br>
<br>
I thank Kirk Smith for getting the ProPublica article to our
attention as soon as it became available.<br>
<br>
Read. Perhaps weep. Work harder. Learn about the opposition
to biomass stoves.<br>
<br>
Personally, I am disappointed that there was not a glimmer of
recognition of what the TLUD micro-gasifiers HAVE ACCOMPLISHED and
have shown to be possible in terms of (A) quite clean cookstoves,
(B) STRONG user acceptance, and (C) that carbon credits ARE working
with TLUD gasifiers. The authors (and those who were interviewed
and quoted) seem to be totally unaware of the REPORTED IN 2016
success in the Deganga pilot study with 11,000 Champion TLUD stoves
(see <a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="http://www.drtlud.com/deganga2016">www.drtlud.com/deganga2016</a> ) And lesser known is that
the number of households has invreased to about 40,000. And we
are looking for funding for scale up for the larger numbers.<br>
<br>
But this article will make it even more difficult to get funding for
scale-up of the TLUD stove success story. However, if it can stop
wasted money on the UNsuccessful stove-types that are indicated (but
not named) in the article, I am not against that. <br>
<br>
This is now mid-2018. The GACC will claim success to reach 100
million households by 2020 on the basis of LPG stoves in India.
And then what???? <br>
<br>
Read the article. It is worthy of some discussion here on the
Stoves Listserv..<br>
<br>
Paul<br>
<br>
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">Doc / Dr TLUD / Prof. Paul S. Anderson, PhD
Email: <a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:psanders@ilstu.edu">psanders@ilstu.edu</a>
Skype: paultlud Phone: +1-309-452-7072
Website: <a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="http://www.drtlud.com">www.drtlud.com</a></pre>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 7/12/2018 3:15 PM, Kirk R. SMITH
wrote:<br>
</div>
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<p class="MsoNormal"
style="mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto">The
article, which has been in progress for some two years, is
finally out by ProPublica – see below.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"
style="mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto">It
is greatly truncated from what was intended by its original
author, Andy Revkin, who moved out of ProPublica late last
year. It now basically just focuses on the Global Alliance
and does not deal with the much wider set of issues now being
investigated in the field. Perhaps, in retrospect, it was too
ambitiously conceived to fit within the fairly narrow framing
that ProPublica usually takes.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"
style="mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto">The
full article on the website has some nice photos by Ashima
Narain, a Mumbai photographer, which were nearly all taken at
our research site north of Pune, although no discussion of our
work at the site on promoting LPG use among pregnant women
survives in the text.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"
style="mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto">Not
a bad piece, given its relatively narrow focus, but I do
complain about its title. The amount of international funds,
even adding in those of the Alliance, is still miniscule
compared to the scale of the problem. More on this later/k</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"
style="mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto"><span
style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="vertical-align:baseline"><b><span
style="font-size:24.0pt;font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif;color:black">Undercooked: An Expensive
Push to Save Lives and Protect the Planet Falls Short</span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="vertical-align:baseline"><b><span
style="font-size:18.0pt;font-family:"Arial",sans-serif">Millions
of lives were at stake. Hillary Clinton was on board.
Money poured in. And yet the big aims behind an effort to
tackle the plague of third-world cooking fires has
produced only modest gains.</span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="vertical-align:baseline"><span
style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Arial",sans-serif;color:#a6a6a6">by </span><b><span
style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"inherit",serif;color:#a6a6a6;border:none
windowtext 1.0pt;padding:0in">Sara Morrison</span></b><span
style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Arial",sans-serif;color:#a6a6a6"></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="vertical-align:baseline"><span
style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Arial",sans-serif;color:#a6a6a6"> July
12, 2018, ProPublica, </span><span
style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif"><a
href="https://www.propublica.org/article/cookstoves-push-to-protect-the-planet-falls-short"
target="_blank" moz-do-not-send="true"><span
style="color:blue">https://www.propublica.org/article/cookstoves-push-to-protect-the-planet-falls-short</span></a></span><span
style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Arial",sans-serif;color:#a6a6a6"></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"
style="margin-bottom:12.0pt;background:white;vertical-align:baseline"><span
style="font-size:13.5pt;font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif;color:#333333"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"
style="margin-bottom:12.0pt;background:white;vertical-align:baseline"><span
style="font-size:13.5pt;font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif;color:#333333">For many decades, it was
one of the globe’s most underappreciated health menaces:
household pollution in developing countries, much of it
smoke from cooking fires.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"
style="margin-bottom:12.0pt;background:white;vertical-align:baseline"><span
style="font-size:13.5pt;font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif;color:#333333">The dangerous smoke — from
wood, dung or charcoal fires used by 3 billion people in
villages and slums across Africa, Central America and Asia —
was estimated by health officials to shorten millions of
lives every year. The World Health Organization in 2004
labeled household pollution, “The Killer in the Kitchen.”
Women and children nearest the hearth paid the greatest
price.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"
style="margin-bottom:12.0pt;background:white;vertical-align:baseline"><span
style="font-size:13.5pt;font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif;color:#333333">If the health costs were
not ominous enough, many environmental advocates worried
that what was known as “biomass” cooking also had
potentially grave consequences for the planet’s climate.
Emissions from the fires were contributing to global
warming, it was feared, and the harvesting of wood for
cooking was helping to diminish forests, one </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"
style="margin-bottom:12.0pt;background:white;vertical-align:baseline"><span
style="font-size:13.5pt;font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif;color:#333333">In 2010, the Global
Alliance for Clean Cookstoves was formed to help mount a
sustained effort at tackling the threats posed by household
pollution. The alliance pledged to help engineer the
distribution of 100 million cookstoves, small-scale
appliances designed to cut fuel use and toxic emissions in
impoverished households worldwide by 2020.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"
style="margin-bottom:12.0pt;background:white;vertical-align:baseline"><span
style="font-size:13.5pt;font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif;color:#333333">The United Nations
Foundation was a founding partner in the effort. Hillary
Clinton, then the U.S. Secretary of State, lent the support
of the American government, promising money and the
resources of a handful of agencies. “Millions of lives could
be saved and improved,” Clinton said when the alliance’s
formation was announced, adding that clean stoves could be
as transformative as vaccines.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"
style="margin-bottom:12.0pt;background:white;vertical-align:baseline"><span
style="font-size:13.5pt;font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif;color:#333333">Eight years and $75 million
later, however, the Alliance has fallen well short of its
ambitious health and climate goals.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"
style="margin-bottom:12.0pt;background:white;vertical-align:baseline"><span
style="font-size:13.5pt;font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif;color:#333333">An array of studies,
including some financed by the Alliance itself, have shown
that the millions of biomass cookstoves of the kind sold or
distributed in the effort do not perform well enough in the
field to reduce users’ risk of deadly illnesses like heart
disease and pneumonia.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"
style="margin-bottom:12.0pt;background:white;vertical-align:baseline"><span
style="font-size:13.5pt;font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif;color:#333333">The stoves also have not
delivered much in the way of climate benefits. It turns out
emissions from cooking fires were less of a warming threat
than feared, and that — outside of some de-forestation hot
spots — the harvesting of wood for cooking fires only
modestly reduces the sustainability of forests.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"
style="margin-bottom:12.0pt;background:white;vertical-align:baseline"><span
style="font-size:13.5pt;font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif;color:#333333">The lack of impact on a
warming planet, in turn, has undercut the Alliance’s plan to
raise additional millions in investments from corporations
eager to underwrite the cookstove movement as a way of
compensating for their own emissions or polishing their
records for environmental responsibility.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"
style="margin-bottom:12.0pt;background:white;vertical-align:baseline"><span
style="font-size:13.5pt;font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif;color:#333333">The Alliance’s top
officials do not dispute that they have met with an array of
disappointments. For one thing, they said, some of the
countries and companies that pledged tens of millions of
dollars early on failed to deliver, which they blamed on
shifting priorities and agendas, not the Alliance’s
struggles.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"
style="margin-bottom:12.0pt;background:white;vertical-align:baseline"><span
style="font-size:13.5pt;font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif;color:#333333">Kip Patrick, the Alliance’s
senior director of global partnerships and communications,
pointed to the effort’s benefits, saying the millions of
biomass stoves distributed so far have cut the time women
spend foraging for wood and costs to poor households of
purchasing fuels such as charcoal.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"
style="margin-bottom:12.0pt;background:white;vertical-align:baseline"><span
style="font-size:13.5pt;font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif;color:#333333">Patrick added that the
Alliance had acknowledged its disappointing initial results
and adjusted its strategy for going forward.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"
style="margin-bottom:12.0pt;background:white;vertical-align:baseline"><span
style="font-size:13.5pt;font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif;color:#333333">The Alliance’s plans for
the future come with something of an ironic twist: It will
now make greater efforts to promote and distribute stoves
that use propane, a fossil fuel, the same blue-flamed
byproduct of gas drilling contained in cylinders under
countless American backyard grills. (Outside of the U.S.
propane is most commonly called liquefied petroleum gas, or
lpg.) These stoves, it turns out, burn much more cleanly and
efficiently than nearly all biomass stoves, reducing the
harmful smoke given off during cooking while having a
negligible impact on the climate.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"
style="margin-bottom:12.0pt;background:white;vertical-align:baseline"><span
style="font-size:13.5pt;font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif;color:#333333">In an interview last
summer, Radha Muthiah, then the Alliance’s chief executive,
said the Alliance was never against propane stoves, but
should have been more direct about its openness to a
fossil-fuel solution. “We really should have been launched
as the Global Alliance for Clean Cooking,” she said. “You
cannot talk about stoves without talking about fuels. It’s
half the equation.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"
style="margin-bottom:12.0pt;background:white;vertical-align:baseline"><span
style="font-size:13.5pt;font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif;color:#333333">Reid Detchon, the United
Nations Foundation’s vice president for energy and climate
strategy, said he, too, supports the push behind propane,
though he acknowledged that, on the global scale, the
foundation has a bias toward promoting renewable energy.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"
style="margin-bottom:12.0pt;background:white;vertical-align:baseline"><span
style="font-size:13.5pt;font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif;color:#333333">Kirk R. Smith, a professor
of global environmental health at the University of
California, Berkeley, who has likely done more work on the
health effects of cooking pollution in the developing world
than anyone, said the Alliance’s setbacks reflected “a
classic issue of identifying a problem and thinking you know
the solution just because you know the problem.” Previous
tries by outsiders to reinvent how the developing world
cooks also yielded little, he acknowledged.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"
style="margin-bottom:12.0pt;background:white;vertical-align:baseline"><span
style="font-size:13.5pt;font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif;color:#333333">“Maybe there will be that
magic stove eventually,” Smith said of the long push behind
improved biomass stoves. “But after 60 years it’s beginning
to look a little doubtful.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"
style="margin-bottom:12.0pt;background:white;vertical-align:baseline"><span
style="font-size:13.5pt;font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif;color:#333333">Public health researchers
have long had concerns about the dangers of open cooking
fires. When fuel is burned inefficiently — particularly
hunks of solid fuel, like wood or dried dung — it produces a
dizzying and dangerous array of noxious gases and particles
containing traces of dozens of toxic constituents.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"
style="background:white;vertical-align:baseline"><span
style="font-size:13.5pt;font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif;color:#333333">The main worry is with the
tiniest motes — known as PM 2.5, particulate matter smaller
than 2.5 microns across. (An average human hair is 70
microns across.) These particles penetrate deeply into the
lungs, and the smallest, as <a
href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4740122/"
moz-do-not-send="true"><span
style="color:#217ce3;border:none windowtext
1.0pt;padding:0in">recent research shows</span></a>, can
cross into the bloodstream.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"
style="background:white;vertical-align:baseline"><span
style="font-size:13.5pt;font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif;color:#333333"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"
style="margin-bottom:12.0pt;background:white;vertical-align:baseline"><span
style="font-size:13.5pt;font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif;color:#333333">One of the earliest hints
that rural cooking smoke was causing significant illness
came in a 1959 paper written by the pioneering Indian
cardiologist Sivaramakrishna Iyer Padmavati (who, at 101, is
still practicing). Padmavati and her collaborators were
weighing possible causes of cor pulmonale, a failure of the
right side of the heart linked to lung problems. The
majority of cases were not city residents, according to the
study.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"
style="margin-bottom:12.0pt;background:white;vertical-align:baseline"><span
style="font-size:13.5pt;font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif;color:#333333">“In the rural and semirural
areas, the houses were mostly 1- or 2-roomed mud huts in
which several members of the family lived together,” the
authors wrote, adding, “There was no outlet for smoke with
the result that the house was filled with smoke when the
family meal was cooked.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"
style="margin-bottom:12.0pt;background:white;vertical-align:baseline"><span
style="font-size:13.5pt;font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif;color:#333333">A vast body of literature
has accrued since, linking smoke from cooking on solid fuels
to a host of diseases, with India’s toll alone estimated by
some at from 1.1 million to 1.4 million premature deaths a
year. It is a global loss of life that, by some estimates,
is greater than that from all the air pollution from fossil
fuels burned in power plants, factories and traffic jams.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"
style="background:white;vertical-align:baseline"><span
style="font-size:13.5pt;font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif;color:#333333">The threat can be
appreciated inside Sulabai Dhavkar’s home on the outskirts
of <a
href="http://www.census2011.co.in/data/village/555244-taleran-maharashtra.html"
moz-do-not-send="true"><span
style="color:#217ce3;border:none windowtext
1.0pt;padding:0in">Taleran</span></a>, a village nestled
against the Sahyadri, the Benevolent Mountains, 60 miles
east of Mumbai in India’s Maharashtra state. The sculpted
clay stove in the home — visited last summer by ProPublica —
remains a prized fixture on the hearths of more than 150
million Indian households.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"
style="background:white;vertical-align:baseline"><span
style="font-size:13.5pt;font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif;color:#333333"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"
style="margin-bottom:12.0pt;background:white;vertical-align:baseline"><span
style="font-size:13.5pt;font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif;color:#333333">The wood for the stove
comes from a pile near the house collected from surrounding
scrub and forests and the bluish smoke that rises once the
fire is lit engulfs Dhavkar. She spends hours in it as she
cooks the morning meal and then repeats the experience at
dinnertime.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"
style="margin-bottom:12.0pt;background:white;vertical-align:baseline"><span
style="font-size:13.5pt;font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif;color:#333333">Starting around 2000, worry
about the dangers lurking in homes like Dhavkar’s began to
resonate more widely. Early in President George W. Bush’s
administration, the State Department and Environmental
Protection Agency launched the Partnership for Clean Indoor
Air.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"
style="margin-bottom:12.0pt;background:white;vertical-align:baseline"><span
style="font-size:13.5pt;font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif;color:#333333">New designs for stoves that
could burn the world’s oldest fuels more cleanly came from
nonprofit organizations, academics and entrepreneurs who had
been exploring how improved technology could curb
deforestation or address the challenges of rural poverty.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"
style="margin-bottom:12.0pt;background:white;vertical-align:baseline"><span
style="font-size:13.5pt;font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif;color:#333333">Cookstoves seemed like an
affordable and effective answer to the “Killer in the
Kitchen.” The appliances, some as small as a Crock-Pot and
costing as little as $25 — gained wider currency in December
2009, when The New Yorker magazine ran an article by
Burkhard Bilger subtitled “the quest for a stove that can
save the world.” The article centered on “Stove Camp” — an
annual retreat in Oregon at which the engineers and
entrepreneurs at the heart of the burgeoning cookstove
movement refined their designs.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"
style="margin-bottom:12.0pt;background:white;vertical-align:baseline"><span
style="font-size:13.5pt;font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif;color:#333333">In the first two years of
the Obama administration, an effort bringing together
government efforts and private partners felt like a logical
next step. The goal of distributing 100 million stoves by
2020 was audacious, some of the initiative’s developers
cautioned, but the Alliance’s partners were impressive and
deep-pocketed.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"
style="margin-bottom:12.0pt;background:white;vertical-align:baseline"><span
style="font-size:13.5pt;font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif;color:#333333">A base of operations was
offered by the U.N. Foundation, the charity created in 1997
with a billion-dollar pledge from Ted Turner. The Obama
administration committed more than $50 million over five
years to test stoves and spur innovation on cleaner designs.
Another $10 million came in initial commitments from
partners including the governments of Germany and Norway.
The oil and gas giant Shell eventually ponied up a total of
$13 million, with more money and support coming from its
independent philanthropic foundation. Morgan Stanley, the
investment bank, added an unspecified financial contribution
from the company’s charitable foundation to help underwrite
a study assessing the benefits of low-emission
biomass-burning stoves on pneumonia rates and birthweight.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"
style="background:white;vertical-align:baseline"><span
style="font-size:13.5pt;font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif;color:#333333">The Alliance’s coming out
party took place at the <a
href="https://www.clintonfoundation.org/clinton-global-initiative/meetings/annual-meetings/2010"
moz-do-not-send="true"><span
style="color:#217ce3;border:none windowtext
1.0pt;padding:0in">sixth meeting of the Clinton Global
Initiative</span></a>, an annual showcase and
fundraising effort for anti-poverty projects built around
the allure of the former president and first lady. At the
New York Sheraton in late September 2010, Hillary Clinton
spelled out the costs in lives and women’s time and welfare
from persistent reliance on smoky cooking fires.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"
style="background:white;vertical-align:baseline"><span
style="font-size:13.5pt;font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif;color:#333333"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"
style="margin-bottom:12.0pt;background:white;vertical-align:baseline"><span
style="font-size:13.5pt;font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif;color:#333333">Clinton credited past
efforts involving cookstoves, but noted most had faltered.
She stressed that one of the things that would distinguish
the Alliance’s approach would be a concentrated and rigorous
push to make sure families that obtained stoves actually
used them, and used them properly.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"
style="margin-bottom:12.0pt;background:white;vertical-align:baseline"><span
style="font-size:13.5pt;font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif;color:#333333">“Previous efforts have
taught us that if local tastes and preferences are not
considered, people will simply not use the stoves, and we’ll
find them stacked in piles of refuse,” she said. “If we do
this right, these new stoves will fit seamlessly into family
cooking traditions while also offering a step up toward a
better life.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"
style="margin-bottom:12.0pt;background:white;vertical-align:baseline"><span
style="font-size:13.5pt;font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif;color:#333333">“The next time you sit down
with your own family to eat,” she pleaded, “please take a
moment to imagine the smell of smoke, feel it in your lungs,
see the soot building up on the walls, and then come find us
at the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"
style="margin-bottom:12.0pt;background:white;vertical-align:baseline"><span
style="font-size:13.5pt;font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif;color:#333333">Representatives for Clinton
and the Clinton Global Initiative did not answer questions
about the Alliance’s work.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"
style="margin-bottom:12.0pt;background:white;vertical-align:baseline"><span
style="font-size:13.5pt;font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif;color:#333333">Within two years of the
Alliance’s launch, evidence began to emerge suggesting its
plan for biomass stoves improving health outcomes wasn’t
working.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"
style="margin-bottom:12.0pt;background:white;vertical-align:baseline"><span
style="font-size:13.5pt;font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif;color:#333333">The Alliance’s own records
make clear that of the tens of millions of stoves its
members sold or distributed, only 2 million were biomass
stoves that met the standard it set for “clean.” And that
standard, while a great improvement over an open, unvented
fire, was still akin to secondhand smoke produced by burning
40 cigarettes an hour in a home.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"
style="margin-bottom:12.0pt;background:white;vertical-align:baseline"><span
style="font-size:13.5pt;font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif;color:#333333">In interviews, scientists
credited the Alliance for drawing attention and funding to
the vast, underappreciated toll from cooking pollution. But
some worried that the smoky standard for “clean” stoves was
a regrettable compromise that flew in the face of
established research about what was necessary to achieve a
genuine health impact.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"
style="margin-bottom:12.0pt;background:white;vertical-align:baseline"><span
style="font-size:13.5pt;font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif;color:#333333">“Health-based discussions
have to be based on peer-reviewed science,” said Rufus D.
Edwards, a professor in the Department of Epidemiology at
the University of California, Irvine, who has extensively
assessed the health and climate impacts of stoves, including
in studies for the Environmental Protection Agency. “If it’s
a political standard, so be it, but don’t call it healthy.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"
style="margin-bottom:12.0pt;background:white;vertical-align:baseline"><span
style="font-size:13.5pt;font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif;color:#333333">And too few of the stoves —
clean or not — wound up being effectively and consistently
used in poor households from Africa to South America. It was
precisely the shortcoming Clinton had identified as having
frustrated earlier cookstove efforts.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"
style="background:white;vertical-align:baseline"><span
style="font-size:13.5pt;font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif;color:#333333">In 2013, Nandal, a village
of 2,900 residents 130 miles southeast of Mumbai, had been
proclaimed a “<a
href="http://www.samuchit.com/dealers/2-uncategorised/1-bharatlaxmi-stoves-save-lives-in-village-nandal"
moz-do-not-send="true"><span
style="color:#217ce3;border:none windowtext
1.0pt;padding:0in">smoke-free village</span></a>” after
about 500 cookstoves were installed in homes under a project
underwritten by Cummins, an Indiana-based manufacturer of
diesel and alternative energy engines and related equipment.
A year later, a report in Nature magazine found the stoves
weren’t being used.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"
style="background:white;vertical-align:baseline"><span
style="font-size:13.5pt;font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif;color:#333333"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"
style="margin-bottom:12.0pt;background:white;vertical-align:baseline"><span
style="font-size:13.5pt;font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif;color:#333333">ProPublica found much the
same thing last year. In one home, Sonali Maalan Kolekar
explained that the new stove just didn’t perform like her
old one.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"
style="margin-bottom:12.0pt;background:white;vertical-align:baseline"><span
style="font-size:13.5pt;font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif;color:#333333">“This one does things
fast,” she said in Hindi, reaching to her left without
breaking eye contact and nudging a handful of twigs further
into the family’s age-old chulha, a hand-sculpted
open-topped clay perch for a pot or two. Sparks flew, smoke
rose and rice boiled.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"
style="margin-bottom:12.0pt;background:white;vertical-align:baseline"><span
style="font-size:13.5pt;font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif;color:#333333">“That one does it too
slowly,” she added, gesturing behind her toward the
abandoned newer stove.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"
style="margin-bottom:12.0pt;background:white;vertical-align:baseline"><span
style="font-size:13.5pt;font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif;color:#333333">One study after another has
found that the experience in Nandal has been replicated
everywhere.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"
style="margin-bottom:12.0pt;background:white;vertical-align:baseline"><span
style="font-size:13.5pt;font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif;color:#333333">Early on, the Alliance had
said it would only count a stove as distributed if it had
proof it was being used correctly and regularly in an actual
home. Today, the Alliance says it counts every stove it
sends out as distributed, whether it’s being used or not.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"
style="margin-bottom:12.0pt;background:white;vertical-align:baseline"><span
style="font-size:13.5pt;font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif;color:#333333">Patrick, the Alliance
communications official, said making sure stoves are
actually being “adopted” into everyday use is hard and
expensive, but that he hoped the Alliance would have numbers
on how many stoves are regularly being used by 2020.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"
style="margin-bottom:12.0pt;background:white;vertical-align:baseline"><span
style="font-size:13.5pt;font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif;color:#333333">In 2012, the Alliance
funded a study in Ghana by Darby Jack, an assistant
professor of environmental health sciences at Columbia
University’s School of Public Health, that, in part, would
measure if the biomass cookstoves had improved health
outcomes for women and children. In particular, Jack looked
for changes in rates of pneumonia, the Alliance’s top health
target.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"
style="margin-bottom:12.0pt;background:white;vertical-align:baseline"><span
style="font-size:13.5pt;font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif;color:#333333">The study is not yet final,
but Jack said the basics of kitchen pollution science are
clear-cut from his work and that of many other scientists.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"
style="margin-bottom:12.0pt;background:white;vertical-align:baseline"><span
style="font-size:13.5pt;font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif;color:#333333">“The notion was that
low-cost, improved biomass cookstoves get you air
improvements,” Jack said. “We can reject that hypothesis now
with as much certainty as any hypothesis.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"
style="margin-bottom:12.0pt;background:white;vertical-align:baseline"><span
style="font-size:13.5pt;font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif;color:#333333">Patrick acknowledged the
lack of evidence of big health improvements in homes
switching to improved biomass stoves. “Are we where we had
hoped we’d have been seven or eight years ago?” he said.
“Probably not.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"
style="margin-bottom:12.0pt;background:white;vertical-align:baseline"><span
style="font-size:13.5pt;font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif;color:#333333">Other research has cast
doubt on whether cookstoves have done much to improve
environmental damage linked to traditional cooking fires.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"
style="background:white;vertical-align:baseline"><span
style="font-size:13.5pt;font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif;color:#333333">By some estimates,
traditional cooking fires contribute about <a
href="https://books.google.com/books?id=4XdCAgAAQBAJ&pg=PP30&lpg=PP30&dq=billion+tons+carbon+dioxide+annual+cooking+fires&source=bl&ots=Ct2ewhqFv-&sig=DAVHReWrBFi2RTOy9E1JrOij5tI&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi3qJmzwrzWAhUG7YMKHTVMBRkQ6AEIWDAJ#v=onepage&q=billi"
moz-do-not-send="true"><span
style="color:#217ce3;border:none windowtext
1.0pt;padding:0in">1 billion tons a year</span></a> to
global emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse
gases — a small but substantial slice of the annual total.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"
style="background:white;vertical-align:baseline"><span
style="font-size:13.5pt;font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif;color:#333333"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"
style="background:white;vertical-align:baseline"><span
style="font-size:13.5pt;font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif;color:#333333">Moreover, studies have <a
href="https://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v1/n4/full/ngeo156.html"
moz-do-not-send="true"><span
style="color:#217ce3;border:none windowtext
1.0pt;padding:0in">shown cooking fires</span></a> —
particularly in South Asia — also produce a dark sooty smoke
called black carbon that both warms the climate and darkens
glaciers and snowfields, accelerating their melting. A
scientific review <a
href="http://www.igbp.net/news/pressreleases/pressreleases/blackcarbonlargercauseofclimatechangethanpreviouslyassessed.5.4910f0f013c20ff8a5f8000152.html"
moz-do-not-send="true"><span
style="color:#217ce3;border:none windowtext
1.0pt;padding:0in">published in 2013</span></a> concluded
that black carbon was second only to carbon dioxide in
exerting a warming push on climate and that biomass cooking
fires produced about a quarter of human emissions of this
pollutant.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"
style="background:white;vertical-align:baseline"><span
style="font-size:13.5pt;font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif;color:#333333"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"
style="background:white;vertical-align:baseline"><span
style="font-size:13.5pt;font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif;color:#333333">So far, the science
suggests cookstoves help with this in some ways and hurt in
others. A 2016 study showed some “improved biomass”
cookstoves actually produced </span><i><span
style="font-size:13.5pt;font-family:"inherit",serif;color:#333333;border:none
windowtext 1.0pt;padding:0in">greater</span></i><span
style="font-size:13.5pt;font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif;color:#333333"> emissions of black carbon
than open fires, but also, in certain conditions and in
certain seasons, produced another set of emissions that,
surprisingly, had a cooling effect on the climate.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"
style="background:white;vertical-align:baseline"><span
style="font-size:13.5pt;font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif;color:#333333"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"
style="margin-bottom:12.0pt;background:white;vertical-align:baseline"><span
style="font-size:13.5pt;font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif;color:#333333">The Alliance’s own research
has shown that the proportion of non-renewable wood
harvested for traditional cooking fires was far smaller than
previously thought, thereby limiting cookstoves’ other main
environmental benefit — reducing deforestation.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"
style="margin-bottom:12.0pt;background:white;vertical-align:baseline"><span
style="font-size:13.5pt;font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif;color:#333333">The Alliance had been
hoping to persuade wealthy individuals and corporations to
invest in the cookstove distribution effort as a way to
offset their carbon footprints. Their investments, in turn,
could be used to bolster the number and quality of start-up
companies building cookstoves around the world.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"
style="margin-bottom:12.0pt;background:white;vertical-align:baseline"><span
style="font-size:13.5pt;font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif;color:#333333">But the market for
so-called “carbon credits” never really materialized. The
reasons were many, but the fact that cookstoves weren’t
having a clear, dramatic effect on the climate limited their
appeal.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"
style="margin-bottom:12.0pt;background:white;vertical-align:baseline"><span
style="font-size:13.5pt;font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif;color:#333333">“Like a lot of
organizations, we got excited about climate benefits and
climate funding, and we went with what information we had at
the time,” Patrick said. “Any time you learn more things,
you adapt based on new information.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"
style="margin-bottom:12.0pt;background:white;vertical-align:baseline"><span
style="font-size:13.5pt;font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif;color:#333333">In 2018, cooking fires
remain a global problem not much dented by the biomass stove
efforts. The percentage of the population with access to
clean cooking grew almost imperceptibly from 2010 to 2016,
according to research conducted in part by the United
Nations and World Health Organization. A report by the
International Energy Agency cited high fertility rates and
persistent poverty in many Sub-Saharan countries as among
the reasons for the scant progress.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"
style="margin-bottom:12.0pt;background:white;vertical-align:baseline"><span
style="font-size:13.5pt;font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif;color:#333333">The Alliance has called
these and other recent reports “sobering,” and said it and
others concerned about household pollution still faced “an
enormous challenge.” Officials say they remain optimistic,
however, based in part on breakthroughs in the most recent
generation of biomass cookstoves. And the Alliance says
continuing to provide biomass stoves is worthwhile because
so many people won’t have access to propane anytime soon.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"
style="margin-bottom:12.0pt;background:white;vertical-align:baseline"><span
style="font-size:13.5pt;font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif;color:#333333">“The short answers is we’d
love to be further along, but I think there’s a lot of
innovation out there,” said Patrick. The Alliance’s goal
now, he said, is to get people the best stoves possible and
encourage families to use improved stoves as a substitute
for old-fashioned cooking fires instead of a supplement to
them.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"
style="margin-bottom:12.0pt;background:white;vertical-align:baseline"><span
style="font-size:13.5pt;font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif;color:#333333">To accomplish these ends,
the Alliance and others are more openly supporting stoves
that use propane. The Alliance’s website and newsletters
feature more propane stoves, which make up the vast majority
of appliances that meet standards for being “clean.” The
charitable foundation of Shell Oil Corporation, a major
Alliance supporter, has shifted in its own efforts to
underwriting more pilot projects involving propane stoves.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"
style="margin-bottom:12.0pt;background:white;vertical-align:baseline"><span
style="font-size:13.5pt;font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif;color:#333333">Pradeep Pursnani, deputy
director of the Shell Foundation, said the delay in
embracing propane made sense early on — most of the target
users were accustomed to cooking on stoves that burned
charcoal or wood.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"
style="margin-bottom:12.0pt;background:white;vertical-align:baseline"><span
style="font-size:13.5pt;font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif;color:#333333">“Other fuels at the time
were more niche, so by focusing on biomass cookstoves we
would have a higher impact,” Pursnani said, describing the
Alliance’s early approach. “We only really started working
on it [LPG stoves] toward the end of 2016 and in 2017. “</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"
style="background:white;vertical-align:baseline"><span
style="font-size:13.5pt;font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif;color:#333333">Of the Alliance’s shift in
emphasis, Kirk Smith said he didn’t know whether to laugh or
cry. Smith, the professor at Berkeley, said he had begun to
realize that propane cookstoves could be better for people’s
health and the environment than biomass cooking <a
href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0973082608600678"
moz-do-not-send="true"><span
style="color:#217ce3;border:none windowtext
1.0pt;padding:0in">as early as 1994</span></a>.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"
style="background:white;vertical-align:baseline"><span
style="font-size:13.5pt;font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif;color:#333333"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"
style="background:white;vertical-align:baseline"><span
style="font-size:13.5pt;font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif;color:#333333">He crystallized his
concerns in the journal Science in 2002 with what he now
says was an intentionally provocative commentary titled “<a
href="http://ehsdiv.sph.berkeley.edu/krsmith/publications/02_smith_3.pdf"
moz-do-not-send="true"><span
style="color:#217ce3;border:none windowtext
1.0pt;padding:0in">In Praise of Petroleum?</span></a>”
“Rather than excluding petroleum, some of this one-time gift
from nature ought actually to be reserved to help fulfill
our obligation to bring the health and welfare of all people
to a reasonable level,” Smith wrote.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"
style="background:white;vertical-align:baseline"><span
style="font-size:13.5pt;font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif;color:#333333"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"
style="margin-bottom:12.0pt;background:white;vertical-align:baseline"><span
style="font-size:13.5pt;font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif;color:#333333">The main reaction at the
time?</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"
style="margin-bottom:12.0pt;background:white;vertical-align:baseline"><span
style="font-size:13.5pt;font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif;color:#333333">“I never got so much hate
mail,” he recalled.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"
style="margin-bottom:12.0pt;background:white;vertical-align:baseline"><span
style="font-size:13.5pt;font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif;color:#333333">That resistance has proved
stubbornly persistent, Smith said. Those interested in clean
cooking efforts have spurned propane simply because it seems
politically incorrect. He called the Alliance’s enduring and
expensive belief in biomass stoves of a piece with that
history.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"
style="margin-bottom:12.0pt;background:white;vertical-align:baseline"><span
style="font-size:13.5pt;font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif;color:#333333">“The major international
and bilateral development agencies and donors have either
ignored or unofficially opposed providing clean fuels to the
world’s poor on flimsy and I would say unethical climate
grounds,” Smith said in an interview.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"
style="margin-bottom:12.0pt;background:white;vertical-align:baseline"><span
style="font-size:13.5pt;font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif;color:#333333">For Smith and other
disappointed advocates in the fight against household
pollution, the story of the Global Alliance for Clean
Cookstoves seems depressingly familiar — another tale of
well-meaning Westerners keen to help poor people in the
third world, ignoring evidence that their methods might be
ill-conceived.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"
style="margin-bottom:12.0pt;background:white;vertical-align:baseline"><span
style="font-size:13.5pt;font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif;color:#333333">Priyadarshini Karve — a
noted Indian designer of low-emission stoves, including the
now-abandoned stoves in the village of Nandal — said she’d
focused too much on funders’ fuel-efficiency standards and
not enough on what actual women cooks sought in a stove.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"
style="margin-bottom:12.0pt;background:white;vertical-align:baseline"><span
style="font-size:13.5pt;font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif;color:#333333">“The Global Alliance for
Clean Cookstoves focused on replacing a traditional stove
with a product made in a factory because that was the
easiest thing to do,” Karve said in an interview in her
gadget-cluttered office in the city of Pune. “Everyone
jumped on it as a win-win situation. Poor households get
something and we get money.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"
style="margin-bottom:12.0pt;background:white;vertical-align:baseline"><span
style="font-size:13.5pt;font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif;color:#333333">The Alliance brought
resources and a spotlight to the effort, but she questions
how much it accomplished.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"
style="margin-bottom:12.0pt;background:white;vertical-align:baseline"><span
style="font-size:13.5pt;font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif;color:#333333">“I really don’t know if,
even with the megabucks and glamour, the situation at the
ground level is quantitatively different than what was
happening before,” Karve said. “Have people’s lives really
changed? No one knows really.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"
style="margin-bottom:12.0pt;background:white;vertical-align:baseline"><i><span
style="font-size:13.5pt;font-family:"inherit",serif;color:#333333">Andrew
Revkin contributed to this report</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<div style="border:none;border-bottom:solid windowtext
1.0pt;padding:0in 0in 1.0pt 0in">
<p class="MsoNormal" style="border:none;padding:0in"> </p>
</div>
<p class="MsoNormal">Kirk R. Smith, MPH, PhD <<a
href="mailto:krksmith@berkeley.edu" moz-do-not-send="true">krksmith@berkeley.edu</a>></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Professor of Global Environmental Health</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Director, Collaborative Clean Air Policy
Centre, Delhi</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">5115, Berkeley Way West, School of Public
Health</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">University of California Berkeley,
94720-7360 USA</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">510-643-0793; fax 510-643-5056</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><a href="http://www.kirkrsmith.org/"
moz-do-not-send="true">http://www.kirkrsmith.org/</a></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
</div>
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